Constituent Assembly 1949: the tribal census dispute behind reserved seats

The Constituent Assembly reserved seats in proportion to population. Then the man speaking for the tribal communities told the House that the population figure was wrong.

Jaipal Singh was not an opponent of the bargain. He welcomed that under the new Constitution there would be no separate electorates and that Adivasis would be elected from joint general electorates, and he supported Dr Ambedkar's amendment to article 292 providing reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.¹

He was a beneficiary, agreeing to it. And then he attacked the foundation it stood on.

Cooking of figures

one minute the Gonds are enumerated as Hindus and the next minute they come back as Adivasis; and that tyep of cooking of figures and misenumeration has gone on at every census

The spelling is the record's own. He alleged that in the Central Provinces the Adivasi figure was reduced by 18 lakhs between 1911 and 1941 through misenumeration.¹

The same debate carried the opposite complaint. A speaker alleged that most figures for tribals had been inflated, with some Scheduled Castes recorded as converted to tribal religion or to Hinduism, producing an increase of 184 per cent.¹ That is an allegation from the floor, not a finding about the census.

In one discussion, then, the count is accused of being too low in one province and too high elsewhere.

Jaipal Singh gave the figure the state was working with: ¹ Against it he set another: ¹

He was also unwilling to accept the clock. He said he was not at all optimistic that in the short space of 10 years, which meant two general elections, Adivasis would have come to the level of the rest of India.¹

The seat arithmetic, province by province

The figures below are the ones Jaipal Singh gave the House. They are his numbers, quoted in debate, and this archive holds no separate source for them, so hold them loosely.

Under the Government of India Act, 1935, he said, there were altogether only 24 Adibasi members of the legislative assemblies out of a total of 1,585, so far as the Provincial legislatures were concerned.² At the Centre, under that same Act, not a single Adivasi representative.²

Bihar had 5.1 million Adivasis and 7 Adivasi MLAs. The Central Provinces and Berar had 2.9 million Adivasis before the merger of the princely States and 1 seat for them, and the merger would add about 2.8 million more people, a large majority of them Adivasis. Bombay, without the merged States, had 1.6 million, a figure the 4.4 million brought in by merger might double, and 1 reserved seat. Assam had 2.4 million, with 9 seats.¹

So in the Central Provinces the population roughly doubles and the seat count, as things stood, was 1.

Counted in, reserved out

Assam is where the counting itself becomes the argument. Reverend J. J. M. Nichols-Roy told the House how that population was distributed:

in Assam there are three classes of scheduled tribes, and all these together are calculated to be about 23 to 24 lakhs. Eight lakhs of them are in the plains area eight lakhs of them are in hills area and the remaining eight lakhs are in the tea gardens

Then the detail that matters:

The tribals in the tea gardens are included in the general population, with the result that the only people will have reserved seats will be the eight lakhs in the plains area and the eight lakhs in the hills area.

8 lakhs of about 24 lakhs: present in the count, absent from the reservation.

Another member put Assam's composition on the record as about 20 per cent Muslims, 32 per cent Scheduled Tribes, and about 48 per cent from communities with no reserved seats.¹

Against all of this Jaipal Singh set one number running the other way. Under adult franchise, with 1 member for every lakh of population, he estimated the jump at 10 times the 1935 figure.² For the tribal members the arithmetic at least pointed upward.

The missing crores

The Scheduled Castes could not read their own numbers the same way.

The figure cited for the 1931 census was 50 millions. The 1941 census was said to show nearly 44 millions, and the speaker who read out that figure disputed it on the floor as inaccurate.¹

A census is a headcount taken once a decade. A headcount that falls while the country grows is an argument waiting to happen.

Another speaker made that argument in crores. According to the 1931 Census his community numbered about 7 crores; he pointed to an average population increase of 14 per cent and argued that a poorer community should have increased by more than the average, not less.² He claimed the community had fallen from more than 6 crores in 1931 to 5.5 crores in 1941, and alleged mischief in Bihar, Punjab and Bengal, where Harijans were being converted or absorbed into the Hindu count.²

That is one member's allegation, made in debate, and not the finding of any inquiry.

Assam is where the small number bites. A speaker said the Scheduled Caste population basis for representation in Assam is only 3.25 lakhs, and set that beside the Ahoms at 3 lakhs odd. Before Partition, 1 seat had been allotted in the Constituent Assembly to the Scheduled Castes from Assam.¹

Then the debate moved from arithmetic to loyalty, with allegations about a rival federation's conduct before Partition.¹ Those were charges levelled at a political rival in a House where that rival had already been beaten: in the last election the Congress captured all the Scheduled Caste seats in Assam.¹

So the size of the community was disputed, the shrinkage was blamed on mischief, and the loyalty of its leaders was questioned in the same sitting.

Where it landed in the text

Leave the speeches and open the printed text, because that is where the bargain is either real or it is not.

Articles 15 and 16 prohibit discrimination and give equal opportunities of employment. Article 29 gives the coming government power to throw open Hindu religious institutions to all classes and sections of Hindus, and provides that educational institutions maintained by the State or receiving State aid will be open to all sections. Article 46 gives the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes an important place.³

So far this is the language of access. Doors that may not be shut. No seats.

Now the article that decides who sits in the House. A member reading article 81 told the Assembly that the composition of the Peoples Assembly carried no reservation at all.³ The Chairman of the Drafting Committee told the House that the Minorities Advisory Committee had made no special recommendation on the matter.³

What remains is narrower. Dr Ambedkar's amendment provided that the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes shall bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the seats allotted to a State as their population bears to the total population of that State.¹

That is proportionality, not protection. The seats follow the headcount, and nothing more is promised. Which is why the argument about the headcount was the argument about everything.

Draft article 149(3) set legislative assembly constituencies at not more than 1 representative for every 75,000 of the population, with exceptions for the autonomous districts of Assam and the Shillong constituency.¹

And the list itself is not in the Constitution. Before the Provincial Parliament comes into effect, the President will declare which communities fall under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.¹

Did anyone believe in the deadline?

The Assembly accepted a 10-year limit on reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes, and alongside it agreed to appoint a Special Officer to see to the needs of the Harijan community and the Scheduled Tribes.³

Some in the room believed it. R. K. Sidhva said he was confident that within 10 years this class of people would come up to the level of others.³ N. G. Ranga argued the comparison outward, saying that unlike the United States, still trying to confer civil rights on its Negro population, India's Constitution had sought to confer civic rights on Harijans and backward tribes, and that the Constitution carried a chapter creating autonomous tribal areas in Assam.³

Ranga also reported the doubt. He said Muniswamy Pillay was afraid the Scheduled Castes might not progress enough within 10 years, while Ranga himself was more optimistic.³

The commission written in as insurance

On 16 June 1949, article 301 was added.⁴ It provided that the President may appoint a Commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes and report to Parliament.⁴

A Commission here is an investigating body. It does not decide anything and it hands nobody a seat. It looks, it writes down what it finds, and it puts that in front of Parliament. The machinery being built was a machinery of inquiry, not of guarantee.

Bhargava framed it plainly: so far as the Depressed Classes were concerned, the Assembly had only reserved some seats, and article 301 was meant to complete the process of bringing them up to normal standards.⁴ He then said the safeguards for the Muslims and the Sikhs had been taken away, and that the only responsibility now remaining with Parliament was the Scheduled Castes and the backward classes.⁴

So that they never regret it

Sardar Hukam Singh described the outcome on the floor as this voluntary giving up of all safeguards of reservation of seats,⁴ and attached a hope to it: that fair delimitation by the Election Commission would ensure the minorities never came to regret the decision.⁴

Delimitation is the drawing of constituency boundaries, the lines deciding which voters sit inside which seat. So the thing surrendered was a written, counted guarantee. The thing spoken in its place was a hope about how those lines would be drawn.

Hukam Singh then set out who was not affected. The Scheduled Castes, he said, were safe, because they already had reservation of seats.⁴

That is the record of 1949, stated plainly. Three communities gave up reservation of seats against a hope about boundaries. One group kept its seats, with a clock set for 10 years, counted against a population figure its own representative had called wrong in open session.

What happened to that hope, and to that clock, is not in the speeches of 1949.

MangoPOV. "Constituent Assembly 1949: the tribal census dispute behind reserved seats." 14 September 2026. https://mangopov.in/stories/constituent-assembly-1949-cooking-of-figures/

@misc{mangopov-constituent-assembly-1949-cooking-of-figures,
  title        = {Constituent Assembly 1949: the tribal census dispute behind reserved seats},
  author       = {{MangoPOV}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mangopov.in/stories/constituent-assembly-1949-cooking-of-figures/}},
}